MOTHER

“I was fourteen when I stopped loving my mother.”

The eulogy with which Adam buries his mother is written the morning of her funeral, on the back of his father’s old Spanish homework. On the reverse, a series of exercises had asked Kevin to describe his family. “Carmel is the boss of the home,” he wrote in gently corrected Spanish. “My eldest son, Mark, is short and fat with no hair. He lives alone in Lithgow. My youngest son, Adam, is bald, slim, very intelligent and lives in the mountains.”

The worksheet also asked Kevin to describe himself, using as many adjectives as possible. He wrote: “I am seventy-two years. I have grey hair and blue eyes. The teeth are mine.” Further on, he is asked to describe someone in the third person. Kevin wrote: “My friend Chopper Read is tall, big, ugly and dangerous. His body is tattooed completely. He has no ears and teeth of steel.”

Adam’s eulogy starts with a single word, given a line of its own, a sense of beginning with the end: “Death.” In the church he lets it hang in the air, pleased with his baritone and its resonance. He liked the sound his boot heels made on the timber rise as he walked up to the pulpit. You could hear this in his deliberate footsteps. There is a pause before he continues. “Death,” he says, “makes angels of us all.” In angered biro he had scratched out the next line: “Mum didn’t have to die.” Each word is scribbled over, then long arcs slice through the whole sentence.

He continues: “Mum always was an angel. She was a great mother to my brother and I and a fine wife to my father. My memories of Mum now are from childhood. Now that she’s passed on I feel as if I’ve been reduced to a child again. Infancy and the love of a mother. My mum was a very talented potter and actress – at times she sacrificed both to be with us – she always put family first. So this is how I see today: a celebration, a celebration of an amazing life. I love you, Mum. Forever.”

*

Adam looked mostly like his mother and inherited from her his pattern baldness and his weight. Carmel had a comfortable Black Irish face. Her hairline ran high on her forehead in a perfect half-moon that was mirrored by the arc of her jaw. It was a large face, made for smiling. Adam’s was as well, although he took more pleasure in holding off a grin – waiting for the person with whom he was talking to become nervous before allowing the joke to arrive on his face, bringing to the conversation a sense of relief.

Carmel’s forehead was frequently shortened by the eyebrows she raised in mock surprise. She underlined points by opening her eyes very wide and had the strong presence of a matriarch used to being heard. Although she played blousy maternal figures in a handful of soap operas, she was cast mostly in comic roles. She would be a Greek on SBS – indeed, she was cast a Greek in the television series The Girl from Steel City and the 1975 film Promised Woman – and then the shoe-dwelling old woman of an Arnott’s biscuit commercial.

At school, Adam was proud of this: “It was good having a mum on TV because kids thought you were cool.” He would boast to other boys of her fame, and insinuate that he had relationships with actresses. But he was always uneasy with his pride. “She was in The Benny Hill Show when they made an Australian special,” he said. “In the credits she was listed as the ‘Embarrassingly Fat Woman’.”

It was not until she died that Adam admitted he actually loved his mother. Certainly, his love was never unconditional. At her wake a cousin confided to me that the family had worried over what he might say at the funeral. When she had become sick with leukemia, her deterioration had only heightened what he detested in her.

She was, among other things, never pretty enough for Adam. “She’s just this strange, pale, skeletal, sagging head with wispy, white hair combed back and plopped on top of a tent dress,’ he said once. ‘The O’Loughlan clan: they’re all such fucking weirdoes.”

*

The first time Adam mentions his mother to me, he says she didn’t breastfeed him. This seems important to him, a kind of glib epigraph for the relationship that followed. The milk was too rich, so the child was put on formula. “I just never took to the love of a mother. I couldn’t stomach it,” Adam says. “I never have, really – I’ve never had that connection.”

Nursing became a semi-regular theme in Adam’s work. He liked to talk about what he called “monetary/mammary” transactions. In Human Milk, a monkey-headed woman stands naked beside the sign that gives the painting its title. She has cherry-red nipples and childless hips. A string of sausages below, cut in several places and labelled with the words “gene splicing”, hints at Adam’s increasing sense of disconnection from the world. In Actual re-enactment, scraps from Adam’s notebooks are writ large across three panels: a fax number, the track list from an album of golfing songs, taxonomy charts. Over the final panel the words “warm mammary war” are spray-painted in thick black text.

In his mind at least, Adam’s childhood rejection of breast milk cemented the myth he had built of his father as heroic provider. Adam’s difficulties loving his mother were always an excuse to love his father more: “Dad made eight pounds a week and spent three pounds on my formula.” It also fed his belief that some intractable feud existed between Carmel and him. “I don’t know why she hates me so much,” he said. “She didn’t even have to breastfeed me.”

*

When Carmel met Kevin, she was the single mother of a seven-year-old son. He was a recent widower, she was abandoned. “When Dad’s first wife died, there was a lot of shame in that because they had been married for eighteen months,” Adam said, shortening the marriage by two and a half years. “Then he married a Catholic who drank and had a son, and that’s just not done if you’re a Proddy. It just ostracised our family. They leave the bush, go and live in the city: who the fuck do they think they are?”

Carmel O’Loughlan was born 350 kilometres south of Kevin, in a tent outside Gundagai. From Wagga Wagga she studied by correspondence with an outfit called the London College of Drama, and as a teenager convinced her truck-driver father to move to Sydney so she could pursue a career in acting. She took singing lessons and got work at the Independent Theatre in North Sydney. But it was the tent in which she was born that made Adam proudest of his mother, and he frequently showed a black and white photograph of it. “My mother was born in a fucking tent,” he said, “and now she’s on TV.”

Carmel met Kevin in 1962, the year his first wife died. A year later they were married. “My first wife died and I didn’t care about anything much. Didn’t care about anything,” Kevin said. “Then I met Carm and it was good again. Carm was a bad woman. She had a seven-year-old son and she was an actress and she drank red wine and she was a Catholic. But I didn’t care. You can get a good woman anytime; I wanted a bad one.”

*

Adam’s feud with his mother intensified in 2007, when he was hospitalised with pancreatitis. The inflammation of the pancreas, which went on to affect most of Adam’s internal organs, is usually caused by alcohol abuse or gallstones. Adam didn’t have gallstones. Life had caught up with him, and he was wounded by the lack of sympathy it brought when it arrived.

“She wasn’t much help at all,” he said of his mother. “She was a pain in the arse. She was hardly a tower of strength. She was actually whingeing at my bedside. She couldn’t do anything, and Mum is someone who has got to be needed. She has got to be needed. She’s great; she’s a really loving mum if she’s needed. Otherwise, she’s a whingeing, close-minded piece of shit.”

There were two predictable themes when Adam talked about his mother. Her intelligence was the first: “She was too stupid, too narrow-fucking-minded.” The second was his sense of the competition between them as artists. He felt a curious guilt that she had sacrificed her career to be a mother, yet he was vicious with his own success: “She was a bitch. ‘Why has Adam done this? Why is Adam doing this? Why did Adam let this happen?’ It’s all about her. Sorry, Mum: it’s me on the fucking flyer. Mum has no sense of putting her feelings aside. She’s been wrongly done by because I’m successful. That’s fucking success.”

It was only after Carmel died that he confessed what he had craved: a love more unconditional, more praise for his career. “Now that she’s gone, it hurts more,” Adam said a month after her funeral. “There’s certain things she never said that I just wanted her to say. It was like Dad had to say it for her. Things like ‘I respect you for how you think and what you do’. She never, ever said that. I know she was always there for me, but she just wouldn’t say it. She just wouldn’t fucking take that next step.”

*

Puberty did it, and Adam never recovered. “I was fourteen when I stopped loving my mother,” he said late one night. “As a teenager she didn’t progress, and I did. Everything I pushed, she pushed back. She always had to side with my brother, who’s always been very conservative and stupid. We were very close at one time, but she just has a martyr complex. She just complains all the time. She’s been very, very critical of me. She’s been supportive, but very critical at the same time. It’s so difficult.”

Adam’s trouble with his mother was inextricably tied to the hatred he felt for his half-brother, Mark. For a time he worried he was adopted, until he realised it was Mark whom Kevin had taken in. “I had a fair idea but I never asked. I was actually afraid to. I didn’t want to be rejected for knowing too much. When I was eight or nine, it clicked.”

In Adam’s telling, his mother was eighteen when she met a soldier in his early thirties and fell pregnant with Mark. At times Adam would claim the man was a Nazi. He said his brother had no interest in the identity of his father and that the soldier knew nothing of the child.

The truth is the man was a German ship jumper – a dark-haired steward named Werner – who made Carmel pregnant while she was working at the Independent Theatre. The couple married, in line with her family’s wishes, and moved to Melbourne looking for work with the 1956 Olympics. Sick from pregnancy, Carmel returned to Sydney. In Melbourne, Werner sold the young family’s possessions and disappeared. “Eventually the police grabbed him because he was an illegal and he was a wife starver, which was a criminal offence,” Kevin said. “The police asked Carmel, ‘What do you want to do with him?’ And she whispered in response, ‘Put him in jail.’”

*

Adam’s resentment of his brother manifested in fantastical stories, bitter and mostly fabricated. He said Mark bored people at parties; that he was a bisexual, “the most evil thing there is”. He said Mark married a stripper in Potts Point, but she left him because he was too boring. He said Mark couldn’t ride a bicycle.

“He and Mum gang up on me,” Adam said. “That’s why I left home. I have no love for him at all. He’s a complete spastic. I think I just completely frustrate him because he can’t understand me. I mean, how could he? He just has no critical hardware.

“Once I hit puberty, the war began because I wasn’t his little brother anymore. He was a cunt. He was a very conservative prick. Just a square. Every time I’d get my hair cut, he’d say, ‘You look like one of those dumb pricks me and my mates beat up.’ Then the shit hit the fan when I got my nose pierced in high school. He’s really old-fashioned in all of the bad ways. And he’s very aggressive and fucking scared.”

Hating his brother was important to Adam in the same way that rejecting Carmel’s nursing had been: it allowed him to be closer to Kevin. The two boys did not speak to each other at their mother’s funeral. “It was a horror story,” Adam said. “I was with Dad; Mark was with Mum.”

*

Women fare worse than men in Adam’s paintings. They are the victims of greater violence. If his men are impotent, his women are visions of cartoon sex – gin club floozies or wild squalls of genitalia. Their faces are watery, their features barely held together with make-up.

The recurrent woman is a headless figure with smallish feet and mothering breasts. She is a silvery presence in the painting Shut up, nobody wants to hear your stories, all stomach and meaty arms. Her nipples have been spray-painted an angry bitten red, and some enamel has dripped where her head was severed. The patrician face beside her has been painted with greater haste, but the care with which she has been described is more mocking. Each fold of flesh is cruelly drawn, her pubic hair a comic thatch. “I’ve never painted any woman but my mother,” Adam says. “That’s her.”

Carmel kept two paintings of Adam’s in the front room of the house where he grew up. There was a dining table under a lacework tablecloth, and a buffet along one wall in which she stored clippings of Adam’s press in ring-binder folders. Windows opened out onto a tree tied with white netting to protect it from the birds.

The pictures – a competent still life on board and a muddy homage to the Heidelberg School – were done while Adam was still at high school. Both seemed promising but unexceptional, stilted by their earnestness. Carmel pointed to the paintings with a mixture of pride and affection. She had a stoic acceptance of the man Adam became, but she was obviously still in love with the boy he had once been. When Adam arrived, he was furious to find us looking at these pictures.

“I love her, but you just have to keep things nice and simple,” he said later. “She can be embarrassing at art openings. She can really embarrass herself, and me: ‘Adam used to paint really well. I don’t know why he paints this.’ She’s so jealous because I have the career she fucked up in.”

Carmel turned up at a talk Adam was giving at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery soon after we met. From the audience she asked if he ever made more realistic work. “I cut her off like she was someone who wasn’t related, but she pushed the point. That fucked me off,” he told me. “She wanted recognition. She wanted recognition for inspiring me to be a realistic drawer. It was absurd. She didn’t understand. She felt so bad I made it because I wasn’t like her. But she took credit for who I was, she just could never admit it. She was such a sensitive cow. She just wouldn’t understand, she couldn’t fucking do it … She never told me how good I’d done. She never just said, ‘That’s so great.’ Not once. Not fucking once. I only heard that I was the bad guy.”

*

Adam was ten when the pictures he was drawing at school saw him referred to a psychiatrist. They were slapstick jokes mainly, but teachers worried at them. “I was taken to a shrink, and they took along all of my drawings – all these violent cartoons – then they accused my parents of hitting me. This shrink just didn’t know talent when she saw it.”

About the same time, Adam began to believe his father was having affairs, although this never happened. Adam imagined some sort of contract existed between his parents, sealed by his birth: his father would marry his mother and take in Mark, but only on the proviso he could continue seeing other women. Adam never confronted his father about this – perhaps because he knew it was a story of his invention, a fantasy he had built to distance himself from his mother. Still, he maintained until his death that it was true.

“He bought the deal,” Adam said. “I can never understand that, but he bought the deal. He does what he wants. That is the deal. I think that’s why Mum resents me so much.”

*

Carmel had made frittatas with chorizo and sweet chilli sauce. Adam was not answering his phone and we started lunch without him. “He was very lucky to be able to do what he did. I found it very frustrating at times,” Carmel said of his career. “We didn’t say, ‘You’ve got to get a job.’ We did that with Mark. He had to get a job. He wanted to go on the music trail, but we were old-fashioned. By the time Adam was at that age, we realised the art was it. By the time he was in his teens, we knew it was best to let him do what he wanted.”

Kevin interrupted: “Adam moved along in his life with a very quick development. He was unrestricted; I wouldn’t say controlled. Let me tell you about Carmel. Adam wanted a motorbike. I was dead against it. Carmel is wiser than I. She said, ‘Let him get a motorbike, but make sure he gets a safe one.’ We didn’t restrict him, but we guarded him.”

Carmel eased the conversation towards her career. It was the great source of strife between her and her son, and in her gentle way she made clear that some of the resentment Adam complained of was real – amplified by his capacity for myth, but still there. “I only did work that wouldn’t interfere with our home life. If I had a job, I couldn’t put any make-up on because Adam would muck up all day trying to get me to take it off. I did restrict what I did. I never did theatre work, because I had to be here. I did restrict myself quite a bit. Adam didn’t like me being anywhere but here. I hid what I was doing and only did jobs in school hours. He started preschool, but he only lasted a day.”

Carmel poured herself a drink. By now Adam had missed lunch. “It was incredible how fast Adam did these things,” Carmel continued. “We just got a phone call and he would be back here. But he ended up at this psychiatrist who said we were hitting him: that I must be an actress and be away all the time. He didn’t draw for six months after that, but he said he wouldn’t go back.”

Adam arrived and Kevin got up to greet him in the kitchen. Carmel pushed on, anxious to finish the conversation before he reached the table. “I didn’t want to mix with the acting fraternity because I didn’t get any satisfaction out of that,” she said, tempering her previous statements, keen to show how she had nurtured his creativity. “All I know about Adam is that he always had a pen or a brush or pencil in his hand. I’d sort of paint, but I would never tell him not to join in. He was very happy doing that sort of thing.”

*

“Excuse my call of urgency,” Adam begins our first conversation of 2010. “My parents are sort of ageing and stuff. Mum’s dying and Mark is just the biggest cunt. He won’t even call Mum. She’s dying and he won’t even fucking call her.”

Chemotherapy had made Carmel too sick for Christmas. A stroke had taken the sight in one of Kevin’s eyes and left him unable to drive for a time. For Adam, Carmel’s sickness was about Kevin. He said his father now did all the cleaning at home, that when his mother tried to cook, it took her an hour to peel a potato. But there was sudden concern in his voice at losing the woman he claimed not to have loved for thirty years. “It’s all happened so fast. I don’t think they’re handling the change so well. I suppose they’re apprehensive about all these changes all of a sudden. Their whole life is based around appointments and seeing people and being healthy. I hope they can just hop over this first hurdle and settle into some sort of routine where it’s not so demanding the whole time. Carm’s always been so needy, but Kevin’s suddenly lost his independence. In short, they’re fine: they’re enduringly indestructible.”

He worried about their ability to keep his childhood home. He often said he would go back to live there, and ranted about his brother’s imagined intention to sell the house Kevin had built. “They’ve had a few fights because Dad changed the will. I don’t know the contents, but I think it’s to do with what happens with Mark and the house. Dad built every structure in that house. It should be a mausoleum: his castle. I told Dad it should stay with me and not be sold. The only time they fight is over Mark.”

*

The last time I saw Carmel, she was bald. I mentioned what Adam had told me about his own baldness, acquired during a teenage dalliance with skinhead culture and worn through adulthood. “I started shaving my head when I was seventeen,” he had said. “And then, when I stopped, I was bald.”

By the time Adam left home, he was frequenting the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe. His bald head and cherubic face made him stand out among the elderly drinkers. He was an oddity, and he enjoyed it. “Adam used to tell them he had leukemia and they gave him free beer,” Carmel said. “Now I’ve bloody got it. He gave it to me.”

*

Adam cried a lot when his mother finally died. He was in Karratha painting for a show when he heard the news. “I’m not really all that well,” he said when he called to tell me. “Mum’s dead. I’m not that concerned about her. I’m just concerned about my old man. He was in tears when he told me. He just said, ‘She’s gone.’ I was in fucking tears. All I said was, ‘Oh shit. Oh shit.’ What else do you say? I was in this lonely hotel room in the desert and I get a call from a grieving man telling me my fucking mum’s dead? Her corpse had the strangest smile on its face. It looked like she was taking the piss.”

The diary he kept at the time was a stubby Moleskine that smelt faintly of sour cranberry juice, as did everything in his house. He often kept more than one diary a year because he filled them faster than was allowed for by the ordinary passing of time. Appointments would tumble forward through weeks. Lists would re-emerge each month, reordered but still uncompleted.

The diary announces itself with a sad-eyed sketch of a clown, above which Adam has written the words “Beelze Bobo” – a childish bastardisation of the devil Beelzebub. Ten pages later, he writes in bold capitals, “The planet will fuck itself in … 2016.” All of Adam’s diaries are full of such predictions – “Adam Cullen will die in 2018” – and they almost always appear in the first few pages, as if to curse the rest of the book.

The remainder of the diary progresses as they mostly do, with a series of schoolboy cartoons and fanciful inventions: a fatted portrait of Mary MacKillop; a design for an electric helmet; various naked men; the snuffling trunked heads of imagined megafauna. The words to ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners are written across the entries for 23 and 25 June.

On 14 July 2010 he draws no pictures. In uncharacteristically loose lettering he writes a single sentence: “Mum died today.” The word “died” is underscored by a slow, deep line that cuts into the paper. The following day, in capitals, his entry reads: “My mother died yesterday.” The page is marked with a red stamp that spells “Fuck Off” in block letters. The same stamp has been applied to the previous six days, although not to the day Carmel died. It is stamped forward in the diary for another seventeen pages.

There is mournful repetition to the next month. He writes “Mum’s dead” on 17 July. “Dead and gone” on 19 July. On 21 July, simply “Dead”. A coffin appears on 23 July. A Petrine cross begins entering the diary on 25 July: the inverted symbol of Christ, used by Catholics as a sign of unworthiness and later co-opted into Satanism and the predictable iconography of heavy metal.

On 31 July the cross is replaced by a single word, almost illegible, rendered in a hand that is unmistakably drunk: “Mummy.”